How things would have been different with a longer season and some of the big decisions were made.

One of TV’s coolest and most underrated series came to a close Friday night, as The CW aired the final episode of Nikita. I spoke to the show’s executive producer, Craig Silverstein, about the decisions they made in the finale, how the truncated six-episode season changed things and much more.

IGN TV: Did you have the idea in mind for how you'd wrap Nikita up for quite awhile?

Craig Silverstein: No, not super specifically. The idea that certainly Nikita would not die and that Amanda would go down in some way were sort of definites. Besides that, you have a feeling, and you see if that feeling keeps holding when you get closer to those episodes at the end.

Maggie Q in the Nikita series finale.

IGN: With Amanda, she's been the main nemesis for a couple seasons, but she's been around since the beginning. You could have just had her die one way or the other but did it just seem right to you that she had to survive, albeit suffering?

Silverstein: I think so, and I also think that being defeated by Nikita's use of deception and treachery and the things that Amanda gave her was more satisfying and more right seeing as Percy at the end of Season 1 and 2, and Amanda in 3 had pulled these cons, essentially, on Nikita. Having Nikita turn those tables on her and pull a sort of con of her own felt more right than just a shotgun blast to the face… which may have also been okay. [Laughs]

IGN: Well, hey, you did give her a pretty gnarly-looking face before the end.

Silverstein: Oh yeah! Yeah, Ryan f**ked her up.

IGN: He did, he did. Just to clarify, we should assume that they're not locking Amanda in there to starve to death, that people will keep her alive, but well chained up?

Silverstein: Oh yeah, yeah. She'll be in solitary until she breaks out.

Melinda Clarke as Amanda in Nikita.

IGN: [Laughs] You say that, and you're gonna get the fans talking! Now with Nikita and Michael, I think you well know you'd be hearing from some fans if things didn't work out for them one way or the other. Did you ever debate, though, a less than happy ending for them as a couple?

Silverstein: Yeah, that was a potential. I don't think we had time enough to make that work. There are satisfying endings to a big romantic arc where the two people don't end up together that I think are great. I don't think with all the things that were going on in this shortened final season that we could have set up a really satisfying ending in which they weren't together. But it was discussed. We just didn't have time to make it really earned and satisfying, which is the point of any ending, good or bad.

IGN: I will say, as a fan, I definitely geeked out at the end of the fifth episode seeing Alex and Nikita reunite. If the season had been longer, do you think you still would have structured it that way, to have them separated for pretty much the duration of the season, or maybe we could have seen little glimpses of them together prior to that?

Silverstein: Oh, I'm sure it would have come together a bit sooner than right near the end. But, for me, that relationship was always more at the heart of the show. My sort of real uber-plan for the series got a bit derailed somewhere in the second season. Just kind of realizing that the plan I had really makes them enemies and then kind of have this friend thing -- that was not really gonna fly, I guess, for the network, so I made adjustments. But I still kind of held that relationship. It was really satisfying to just sort of hit that note again at the end of that fifth episode.

Lyndsy Fonseca as Alex in NIkita.

IGN: I have to commend you, though, because you do get to have a big Alex/Nikita rematch in the middle there, even if we found out there's more going on later. Was that just an opportunity that you couldn't pass up?

Silverstein: Oh yeah, we had to do that and sort of have it as a mirror to episode 111, "All the Way," where Nikita gets knocked out by Alex -- she asks her to, at the end of the third act. In this construction, it seemed like Alex makes a choice on her own. Except, we find out, not so much!

IGN: Although, it's also a nice mirror to 201, where they fought and Alex pretty much got owned, which made sense at the time. But now you could feel like Alex had progressed more, to keep up with Nikita.

Silverstein: Yep, yep.

Noah Bean as Ryan in Nikita.

IGN: Now, let's talk about the big death. I was very sad and my wife was very upset with you -- she loved Ryan. How did you come to decide that he would be the character to go and when was the right time to take him out?

Silverstein: It seemed appropriate that once we had decided on this structure in which Nikita would "win" in the fourth episode and had seemed to defeat the group -- and yet, not, because we revealed that they let her win as a way to defeat her. "If you can't beat 'em, buy 'em," I guess would be Mr. Jones's philosophy, which Percy and Amanda had never really tried with her. They were always just trying to kill her. So we liked the idea very much of Mr. Jones saying, "Why not just give her what she wants?" So it was appropriate that Ryan would be the one to see past that because he is a character who was always asking questions and always saw a conspiracy at play, even when there wasn't one. Then, also, we needed him to die because we needed to believe Nikita would really go off the rails in the last episode and go on a rampage. So we needed the audience to feel the way she did, and the only way to do that is to really take away somebody you love. If you look at it, if it was Michael, I'd be dead right now. [Laughs] And there was no way I was gonna kill Birkhoff, so poor Ryan had to go.

IGN: Is Birkhoff your favorite son?

Silverstein: Yes! [Laughs]

Continue to Page 2 as Silverstein discusses having the final two episodes of Nikita open up a new storyline, characters we didn’t get to see in the final episode and more.